International audienceMaternal mortality remains very high in many parts of the developing world, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. While maternal deaths are observable, it may not be straightforward for individuals to learn about risk factors. This paper utilizes novel data on male and female perceptions of maternal risk in Zambia to document that superstitions about causes of maternal mortality are pervasive and to uncover evidence that such beliefs impede learning about maternal health risk levels and correlates. In our data, people who hold traditional beliefs disregard past birth complications completely in assessing future risk, unlike those who hold modern beliefs
The use of air quality monitoring networks to inform urban policies is critical especially where urban populations are exposed to unprecedented levels of air pollution. High costs, however, limit city governments’ ability to deploy reference grade air quality monitors at scale; for instance, only 33 reference grade monitors are available for the entire territory of Delhi, India, spanning 1500 sq km with 15 million residents. In this paper, we describe a high-precision spatio-temporal prediction model that can be used to derive fine-grained pollution maps. We utilize two years of data from a low-cost monitoring network of 28 custom-designed low-cost portable air quality sensors covering a dense region of Delhi. The model uses a combination of message-passing recurrent neural networks combined with conventional spatio-temporal geostatistics models to achieve high predictive accuracy in the face of high data variability and intermittent data availability from low-cost sensors (due to sensor faults, network, and power issues). Using data from reference grade monitors for validation, our spatio-temporal pollution model can make predictions within 1-hour time-windows at 9.4, 10.5, and 9.6% Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) over our low-cost monitors, reference grade monitors, and the combined monitoring network respectively. These accurate fine-grained pollution sensing maps provide a way forward to build citizen-driven low-cost monitoring systems that detect hazardous urban air quality at fine-grained granularities.
Chapter 4 reviews changes in employment regulation in 63 countries over the past two decades, focusing on changes in the regulation of different forms of employment (in particular agency, fixed‐term, and part‐time work) and employment protection law (EPL). The most distinct changes, globally and especially in Europe, have been the increases in the relative strength of labour regulation that requires equal treatment for workers in agency, fixed‐term and part‐time work. Since the crisis, however, the relative strength of EPL fell in both developing countries and the EU. In the EU, decreases were driven largely by changes to notice periods for dismissal, and to the calculation of redundancy compensation. In the same period, on average, other advanced and emerging economies continued to slightly increase their overall level of EPL. The chapter also analyses the effects of labour regulation and changes in regulation on key labour market indicators including the unemployment rate, the labour force participation rate and the employment to population ratio. The analysis presented in the chapter highlights that there are no negative effects from increased labour regulation. This also confirms the findings of previous studies that showed there was no statistically significant effect between the strength of labour regulation and employment levels.
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